These Fish Are So Loud While Getting It On It's Deafening

posted by Jenn Gidman -

Dec 20, 2017

A type of Mexican fish heads every spring to the Gulf of California to spawn—and their "reproductive orgies," as theAFP puts it, are so loud they can damage hearing in other marine life.

A pair of studies from the same researchers, one published in June in theScientific Reports journal and one posted just this month in theBiology Letters journal, says that the sound of an individual Gulf corvina issuing a pulsating mating call sounds like a "really loud machine gun."

And when hundreds of thousands of them get together to do the deed, "the collective chorus sounds like a crowd cheering at a stadium or perhaps a really loud beehive," says study co-author Timothy Rowell. This commotion-filled copulation isn't just the "loudest sound ever recorded for a fish species," Rowell says. When this happens, it's "among the loudest wildlife events found on planet Earth."